The Low Glutamate Diet Effectively Improves Pain and Other Symptoms of Gulf War Illness, 2020, Baraniuk

Hasn't this been discussed in another thread? Or was that a low glutamate diet for fibromyalgia? Anyhow, if their "low glutamate diet" is like the other low glutamate diet and actually a "low preprocessed food with added MSG diet" it's misleading. Glutamate levels can be affected by other things, perhaps by increasing vegetable intake..

 

But the question is - do you have to remove food that naturally contains glutamate? Some of the foods listed in this thread are associated with inflammation for other reasons than their glutamate content (I get symptoms if I eat nightshades). Other dietary approaches that change your metabolism could work the same way, by regulating glutamate:glutamine ratio, I'd think of typical "anti inflammatory diets" (of which many include tomatoes, not everyone are as sensitive to nightshades as I am).

 

The idea of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors interests me because I and my two children were exposed to methyl bromide and its downstream products immediately before becoming ill with ME/CFS. The authors have this idea that acetylcholine dysregulation makes glutamate receptors over-activated and this causes neuroinflammation and a permeable blood-brain barrier. I am not understanding how that can cause a chronic but fluctuating outcome.

But assuming all that is true, does reducing glutamate in the diet help people with Gulf War illness?

40 GWI people - 20 allocated to a low glutamate diet, 20 on wait list (who subsequently also had a go with the diet). So, an open label trial. The diet was a healthy diet with added micronutrients, possibly much better than some of the participants' usual diets. All outcomes were subjective.

Here's an example of the reported change in symptoms:

I think that level of change is easily explained by the placebo effect of an open-label trial, perhaps assisted by a better diet for some of the participants.

I haven't looked into the stats of the MSG challenges after the one month trial but it sounds like things were all over the place.

I end up being annoyed. Why did they not do a proper blinded trial with everyone on a low MSG diet and some people taking MSG capsules? This study tells us nothing, other than a low-glutamate diet does not cure people with GWI.

Despite a trial design and outcome that do not provide any evidence that a low glutamate diet helps, the authors seem to be talking up the trial as a great success.

 

Welcome to the world of nutritional science

Re fluctuating symptoms - you can have fluctuating levels of the metabolites that are causing problems I guess.